This Week
Ninotchka
Political
Writers Notebook
Ninotchka background.
Ninotchka didn't start out as a political satire, MGM wanted to find comedy material for Greta Garbo and were searching around when Bernie Heymann an MGM executive producer while at the Hollywood Brown Derby asked Melchior Lengyel if he had a good comedy up his sleeve that they could use for Garbo. Lengyel said no he didn't but he would think about the idea.
He phoned in the next day and said he had an idea. The line read; Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, Capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious time. Capitalism not so bad after all.
In the end MGM paid him $15,000 for those three sentences..
The first writing assignment to expand the idea into a screenplay was given to Melchior Lengyel And Salka Viertel. They failed. The next was Jacques de Val who also failed, they then turned it over to the venerable S.N. Behrman.
By this time MGM was hooked on the idea and were not going to give up on the project. In a brilliant move they got Ernst Lubitsch on loan from Paramount as producer and director. He was happy to be directing Garbo and liked much of the dialogue in Behrman's script, but the plotting was loose and the pieces didn't fit well and story didn't flow.
Walter Reisch was a contract writer for metro at the time and Lubitsch had Reisch assigned to the project.
They were using the Behrman script but Lubitsch didn't like the idea of a Siberian nickel mine. He needed something he could show on the screen something like diamonds.
Behrman stuck close to his original script and disagreed with Lubitsch and Reisch and in the end Behrman walked away from the project.
Next Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder were asked to join the team and as it turned out that was the talent combination that made things start to happen.
Politics was at the core of Ninotchka. If you really portrayed a woman of flesh and blood you had to write about her convictions and this inevitably lead you to the nature of life in Russia. And the trials, confessions, the purges, and the terror.
Lubitsch and his writers knew they were braking political protocol but they were aiming for high comedy, not political drama.
Ninotchka was not only breaking with international politics but with the Hollywood left. Many actors, writers and directors were proud to call themselves Communist because they honestly believed that Russian Communism had the answers to unemployment, war and race relations.
Ernst Lubitsch thought otherwise. In 1936 Lubitsch along with many other art notables were invited to visit the Russia. En route to Russia Lubitsch stopped briefly in Vienna to visit his friend Walter Reisch before proceeding to Moscow and Leningrad where he would spend about eight weeks. The two men had a good visit and Lubitsch departed for Russia only to return 19 days later. Reisch asked, why, what had happened in Moscow? Lubitsch said he was committed to silence and wouldn't talk about it.
Speculation is that he had seen first hand the fear and terror that stalked Moscow. Many of his friends in the Russian film industry had been purged or were in jail, or like Eisenstein was simply in disrepute.
Lubitsch came near to validating all of that not long after he returned to Hollywood and told Salka Viertel as she later reported that he was withdrawing from the Anti-Nazi League, saying it was a tool of the Communist. He warned her to get out of it also. She begged him to think it over, it's the only way to fight fascism. His last words were, 'I can't speak for you but I'm getting out.'
The Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood had 4,000 members in its heyday, no one knows how many were actual Communist.
Billy Wilder was a liberal, but he didn't join organizations and didn't like meetings. He was however on friendly terms with many Communist and left leaning writers. And he noticed that after the release of Ninotchka a number of his former friends stopped talking to him. He thinks by and large that Communist have no sense of humor. Years later during the House UN-American Activities Committee hearings Billy was asked what he thought of the unfriendly ten. His answer was, 'Two of them have talent the rest are just unfriendly.'
Ninotchka was a classic romantic comedy, with a clever and witty script written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch, based on a screen story by Melchior Lengyel. Perfect casting brought Greta Garbo into her first true American comedy playing opposite Melvyn Douglas. The charm of the film was in bringing out the clashing ideologies of Soviet communism and western capitalism. In the early stages of the film Garbo is portrayed as a humorless, cold, curt and austere Russian envoy. In some respects it was a parody of her own stiff off screen public image. However this image soon fades and Ninotchka is transformed into a Parisian lover by a persuasive playboy Count played by Melvyn Douglas into a frivolous, romantic figure, and converted away from Communism.
The sparkling screenplay satirizes the Communist political system with sex, humor and wit.
When the scrip was finished it was shot on the MGM lot. The last day of shooting was July 27, 1939 and was not released as an MGM film, but as a lubitsch Production, which likely means that the heads of MGM felt that the political content might pose a problem for the MGM International distribution unit.
The World Premier was at Grauman's Chinese Theater on October 6, 1939 and became an over night success.
Billy Wilder received his first Academy Award Nomination along with Walter Reisch and Charles Brackett for their writing.
Now remember this was 1939 and another film was making it's way toward fame and glory.
Sidney Howard won the Writing Award for Gone With the Wind. Ninotchka was nominated for Best Picture. Gone With the Wind won. Garbo was nominated for Best Actress. Vivian Leigh won for Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.
Now those were the top two films of 1939, but if you look at films of that year you'll have to admit that 1939 was a very good year for Hollywood Pictures: Gone With the Wind, Ninotchka, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and you might find a dozen other worthies to add to that list – yes 1939 was a vintage year.
Ninotchka film trailer Garbo Laughs Click Here
